2009 Film Poll: A Whole World of Hurt

Topping the 10th annual L.A. Weekly/Village Voice Film Critics’ Poll, The Hurt Locker is also director Kathryn Bigelow’s personal best. Impressively old-school in its construction of suspense and character, the film is also horrifically topical with its depiction of existential terror and men at war in the age of the drone aircraft and the IED. Working from Mark Boal’s knowledgeable script, the movie brilliantly conflates human and technological alienation — its protagonist is an artist as crazed as the Joker, the robot bomb defuser he scorns is first cousin to last year’s poll cover boy, WALL-E.

The Hurt Locker is not just the decade’s strongest Iraq movie and the finest action flick of 2009 but a remarkable consensus choice — having also been named the year’s best movie by critical conclaves in both New York and Los Angeles. The Voice poll, which queries film critics throughout the country, had The Hurt Locker on 54 out of 94 ballots; its margin of victory surpassed the runner-up, Olivier Assayas’ Summer Hours, by the poll’s largest percentage since David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. topped Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love back in 2001. (These two movies get a rematch in our film-of-the-decade category, with Mulholland Dr. defeating runner-up In the Mood even more decisively this time around; the big news there is that Spike Lee’s The 25th Hour, a weak 25th in the 2002 poll, ties for second place.)

Auteur allegiance may be a given but, as proof of a critical capacity to compartmentalize, let’s note that, in many cases, the performances transcended the movies — particularly in the portrayal of dangerous characters. Psycho-mother Charlotte Gainsbourg was cited on three times as many ballots as her vehicle, Antichrist (No. 25), while Tilda Swinton and Mo’Nique gave poll-topping perfs as even worse mommies in Julia and Precious, two films that failed to break the Top 25. In the best actor category, Nicolas Cage placed second to The Hurt Locker’s Jeremy Renner for his turn as the world’s most degenerate cop in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, a movie that finished at No. 30. And Christoph Waltz’s affable Nazi villain (Inglourious Basterds) continues his winning streak — Cannes, New York, Los Angeles, this paper — proof that the devil still gets the best lines.

For the complete results and individual critic ballots, go to laweekly.com/filmpoll.